genres and scripts in the head and as social artifacts

Charles Bazerman (bazerman who-is-at humanitas.ucsb.edu)
Mon, 17 Nov 1997 13:21:28 -0800 (PST)

People use the terms genres and scripts in a variety of ways and a variety
of occasions, and given my own beliefs about the heuristic value of
concepts I would be the last to try to straighten everyone out and tell
them what genres and scripts "really are" and where they "actually
reside." As we have seen in the preceding exchanges, however, people tend
to use genres for a single utterance (with the potential for being quite
extended through expectations of what counts for staged completion of the
invoked type) and they tend to use scripts for some interactional sequence
that sets upexpectations for each participant's contribution. But I have
also seen useful invocations of each term that poach on the other's turf
as i have set it out.
Further, again as we have seen in the previous exchanges, scripts tend to
be treated as mental expectations, while genres seem to be treated as the
social artefact or the generalized form for the social artefact. That
probably has more to do with the sources of the recent popularization of
each of the quite ancient terms than it has to do with any substantive
issueof phenomena--"scripts" recently popularized by cognitive scientists
drawing on the analogy to formally scripted dramas, which of course exist
in the textual artifact that have to be realized within the actors
acting--which of course means some kind of cognitive orientation to the
text and the performance of the other actors also realizing the text--but
the cognitive scientists were of course interested in what they believed
was a knowledge-in-the-head that participants had of situations so that
they treated their behavior as pre-scripted performance. Genre of course
came out literary and rhetorical study where
the first orientation is of course to the artifact and the analysis of its
regular features.

The one general, non-historical comment I would make, is that
genres, scripts, and all forms of typified behavior exist both in and out
of the head--or rather at the juncture of the person in the world, and
having correlations with things on ether side of the juncture.
I understand typifications as psycho-social recognition categories.
People treat things a certain way because they recognize them as a certain
kind of thing. Each person's recognitions may be quite distinct, but
insofar as their recognitions orient to similar artefacts and result in
the production of other similar artifacts, which may then be socially
recognized by nbaming, there is a strong dynamic of pattern recognition
and pattern making that priovides an interpretable and somewhat reliable
social world for individuals to navigate their way through by the
invocation of further socially recognized types. The more social artefacts
that can be reasonably understood as patterned, and even make their
principles of patterned construction salient, the more liokely we are to
mutually orient to relatively congruent perceptions of the social world.
So there is a dialectic between the pattern attribution cognitive
practices and the texts lying around on our desks along with our socially
visible behaviors.
I also would like to suggest that the typifications occur in many
dimensions and not just linguistic form (that is, we might say, the
typifications occur within the meanings attributed to the
text--affexctive, ideological, social structural, social relational, etc)
so that further blurs the line between artifact and in the head as to
where the genre lies. Even the linguistic form, of course, is only
meaningful, insofar as individuals can attribute meaning--but meanings
that are part of aligning to a social interaction.

I take one of the virtues of activity and vygotskian approaches to
be that they do not force us to treat the skin as an impermeable boundary
with thought on one side and social interaction and
self-contained/self--evident artifacts on the other.

Yours, in obscurity,
Chuck Bazerman